Luchino
Visconti ,
1906-1976 ; One of the primary forces in the rebuilding of the
Italian cinema after World War 2, Visconti was an enigmatic
and influential figure. Born a count into one of Italy's most
aristocratic families, the young Visconti lived a carefree life,
cultivating a taste for opera and the theater. At the age of
30, he befriended Jean Renoir and followed him to Paris, working
as a costume designer and assistant director. Here he also became
influenced by Marxist ideology and, despite his family background,
became an avid leftist and anti-fascist throughout the remainder
of his life. In 1940 he returned to Italy to make films of his
own, but his first feature, Ossessione (1942), came under fire
from Mussolini's government. An unauthorized reworking of James
M. Cain's "The Postman Always Rings Twice," the film angered
authorities with its gritty representation of everyday life,
and was severely censored.

After
codirecting a documentary, Giorni di Gloria (1945), Visconti
made his second feature, La Terra trema (1947), a story of class
exploitation in a small Sicilian fishing village. Along with
Rossellini's Open City and Paisan and De Sica's Shoeshine and
The Bicycle Thief, La Terra trema officially inaugurated the
Italian neorealist movement. Notable for their use of nonprofessional
actors and naturalistic settings, these films provided a sharp
contrast to the ornate, studio-produced escapist fare officially
sanctioned by the (now deposed) fascist regime. Visconti's subsequent
films were deeply personal, and almost operatic in structure.
His most prominent themes were class exploitation and the manner
in which the upper classes responded to a changing, tumultuous
world; moral decay within families of all classes; and male
(and occasionally female) selfdelusion. In Bellissima (1951),
he told the story of a movie-crazed stage mother obsessed with
attaining stardom for her untalented young daughter. Senso (1954),
set in Austrian-occupied Venice in 1866, when Italian partisans
were scheming to repossess their land, detailed the relationship
between an Austrian officer and his married Italian mistress.
Here Visconti united the realism of his earlier works with the
romanticism that was to categorize his later films. White Nights
(1957), a further example of his break with neorealism, told
of a shy young man who falls for a woman awaiting the reappearance
of her lost love. He returned to neorealism one last time in
the superb Rocco and His Brothers (1960), a gritty, tragic tale
of Southern Italian peasants who relocate to Milan in search
of economic stability.

The
Leopard (1963), one of Visconti's all-time classics (with American
star Burt Lancaster effectively cast in the leading role), was
set in the same time period as Senso It dealt with an aristocratic
Sicilian family responding to the death of its class and the
rise of the bourgeoisie. The finale, a lengthy banquet sequence,
remains one of film history's great set pieces. Sandra (1965)
centered on an upper-crust woman's incestuous involvement with
her brother (as well as her awareness that her mother had doubled-crossed
her father, a Jew, during World War 2). After directing an excellent
adaptation of Camus's The Stranger (1967) with Marcello Mastroianni,
Visconti further explored the rise of Naziism in The Damned
(1969), his most celebrated film, a pitiless look at the disintegration
of a German industrialist family under the Hitler regime. Again
he gathered an international cast (headed by Dirk Bogarde);
the film won Visconti his sole Academy Award nomination, for
best screenplay. In Death in Venice (1971), the filmmaker as
never before focused on the theme of male vanity in telling
of an aging homosexual's search for beauty and purity, in the
person of a good-looking young boy. Ludwig (1973), another tale
of decadent, declining European society, spotlighting the "mad"
king of Bavaria, was seen as heavy-handed, and Conversation
Piece (1975, with Burt Lancaster) was a talky tale of an aging
intellectual, but Visconti was back in form for what would be
his final film, The Innocent (1976), a melodrama about an aristocrat,
married to a beautiful woman, who nonetheless feels compelled
to take a lover. To the end, Visconti remained an individualistic-and
inspired-filmmaker.